A World in Us Page 19
It is now many years since we divorced. Gilles is a highly successful personal trainer. He and Elena are married and have a little girl.
As I see on his website, which I surreptitiously stalk from time to time, fitness is his passion. My philosopher and poet turned into a man who loves supplements and bodybuilding. He is inordinately proud of his body. It’s a massive achievement and a stellar example of what dedicated pursuit of perfection can bring. But it’s not for me. In any sense.
But despite all that has passed and how the events we created made a permanent — and now silent — fracture between our two couples, I will always love him. We took an adventure in the name of love. We got more than we bargained for. Joy. Pain. Growth.
And a family.
My children would not exist if it were not for the risks we took. So how can I ever say it was mistake?
“Mummy, shall we sing?”
“Just a moment darling. Mummy’s working.”
A little girl climbs up on my lap to look at my computer.
“How ’bout…teletummies?”
She starts to sing discordantly. “Tinky Winky…Dipsy…Laa-Laa…Po. Teletummies…Teletummies…say HELLO.”
Morten and I have a daughter. She is a blue-eyed and blonde-haired angel. She is nearly two and a half now. She has us around her little finger. Her Plasticine is on the floor, ground into our rug, and several pieces of Lego are scattered across the hall from where she left them. I will tread on them later, limping as I go. Her father is in the living room, singing “Each Peach Pear Plum” for our son, who’s almost four months.
We live in Sweden on an indie granite island where cars aren’t allowed and people grow their own food. It’s a far cry from the corporate life in fashionable Paris, the rich bohemian life in Notting Hill or the jewel-encrusted middle-class life in Richmond. Our unlikeliest of relationships has resulted in a different paradise.
EPILOGUE
“I know that was your experience of our relationship, but it doesn’t give a very good impression of polyamory,” said Morten as he finished reading the first draft of The Husband Swap. “People are bound to ask why on earth you’re still in an open relationship if it was nothing but heartache.”
For we are in one. Still. An open relationship is a state of mind. An eradication of jealousy that in itself is so worthwhile. And a belief in the possibility of multiple loves. Sometimes theoretical…and sometimes highly enjoyably practical.
“Haven’t you learned your lesson?” asked Linda incredulously, when she heard me recounting the story of a new lover.
“Haven’t you got everything you ever dreamt of?” added another.
“Surely it’s been proven that it doesn’t work! You proved it!” said Charlotte.
“You’re divorced,” I retorted. “Have you proved that monogamy doesn’t work? Will you give up on the dream of having a partner because of the pain you went through?”
“But it’s obvious that people need to be in a partnership. Two people. Like you are now.”
“I’m in a triad now,” I corrected her, because she, like everyone else, had preferred to ignore my newer relationship. But since a year had passed, I felt it had enough weight for me to contradict her. “And I love it. But society doesn’t support us, so yes, monogamy would be easier. But why is your choice of serial monogamy more natural than what I’m doing?” I asked.
“Because…”
As she trailed off trying to think of a reason, I smiled secretly to myself. You could throw anything at me now and I could undermine your argument — snap — like Miss Piggy’s karate chop.
Polyamory isn’t for the faint-hearted. It can only be borne in the long term by those committed to sorting out their demons and growing almost beyond what we recognise as the basis of our humanity. But as a utopia, I still believe in it and in my life I still swear by it.
I’m even chairwoman of the National Polyamory Association in Sweden. My mistakes have given me enough experience to advise others. But it’s still a journey. I’ve learnt from my mistakes, and yes, I keep making more. Fewer now than before.
There have been difficulties and breakups. I’ve learnt to communicate. I’ve healed my wounds. Built my self-esteem. But above all I’ve lived in love. Lots of love.
It really does make the world go round.
“To me it’s only obvious that people need relationships. We die without love,” I said. “I love you, for instance. Not in a jump-into-bed-with-you way, obviously. But love. Really love. And I would love you to find someone with whom you’d be happy. If you found someones and you were all OK with that, then I’d be just as happy.”
Charlotte appeared relieved. “I love you too. And if you get that from someones, I guess I’m OK with that as well.”
LESSONS
WITH EVE RICKERT
FOREWORD TO THE LESSONS
Louisa Leontiades and I could not have had more different childhood experiences, or have come to polyamory in more different ways.
Louisa, like many people, came to polyamory from a traditional monogamous marriage, while I’ve never been in a monogamous relationship. I’ve been in polyamorous relationships since the 1980s (back then, we had no language to describe them save “open”), and have been writing about polyamory since the 1990s.
I’ve never been in a quad. Louisa has. I’ve never lived with my entire romantic network. She has. I grew up in the American Midwest, the son of parents who valued education and taught me direct communication; she was born in the United Kingdom and raised by a family actively hostile to transparency and openness.
And yet…and yet…
As I read Lessons in Love and Life to My Younger Self, I found myself thinking, “Oh, God, I wish I’d known that, too.” Louisa’s imagined conversations with the younger, less-experienced version of herself, and especially the things her exploration of polyamory has taught her, resonated powerfully with me. Our life paths have been very different, but our experiences (and more importantly, the lessons we needed to learn from those experiences) are remarkably, even astonishingly, similar.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by that. Polyamory is not a relationship model that’s widely accepted by…well, by anyone, really. From the moment we’re born, we are told how our romantic relationships are “supposed” to be. Everywhere we look—our parents, our peers, schools, churches, Disney movies, TV shows—we see the same message: there’s only one right way to have romantic relationships. Happiness comes from monogamy and “till death do us part.” When we meet someone we fancy, the course is set: we date, we fall in love, we marry, we have kids, we die. Fade to black.
So perhaps it’s inevitable that we all internalize these ideas, no matter how poorly they fit, no matter how much we try to reject them. We are all social creatures, after all, programmed by our DNA to seek the love and approval of our fellow humans.
“We are all formed of frailty and error;” Voltaire said, “let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly.” It’s my favourite quote, and it’s the backbone of the principles I try to live by. But like Louisa, before I could live this way, I had to first learn to forgive my own folly—to understand that we must apply compassion to ourselves before we can direct it to others.
Like Louisa, I made a lot of mistakes in my explorations of polyamory. Like her, there were times I felt lost, alone in a trackless wilderness, not sure if I would ever find my way home. Like her, I made mistakes, and those mistakes hurt people I loved. (And, like her, I wrote a memoir about the devastating mistakes I made and the people I hurt. It is no easy thing, this business of cataloguing and accounting for the darkest parts of yourself in such a public way.)
I’ve been an advocate for polyamory nearly my entire life. I’ve spoken about it, written about it, and travelled the country lecturing about it. Like any activist, I have tried to present the best face of polyamory
. It is, I absolutely believe, a positive and healthy way to live. I’ve seen and been involved in many polyamorous relationships filled with love and joy, light and laughter.
Yet there is a great grey pachyderm in the living room, something those of us who have been working to promote polyamory as a valid way to live have never really talked about: polyamory is disruptive. From time to time, you will encounter folks who will tell you that polyamory is the next step in human evolution, a golden panacea that can save us from the blind, possessive ownership paradigms of conventional straight-laced monogamy. Don’t listen to them. There isn’t a word of truth to it.
Polyamory is hard. It’s not hard just because it’s a relatively new social construct, and we have few role models to show us how to do it well—though that is true. It’s hard also because it demands a great deal of those who practise it. Intimacy cannot exist without vulnerability, and in polyamorous relationships, we make ourselves vulnerable to many people. We also accept vulnerability from many people, and that means we have the capacity, if we are not meticulously careful, to hurt many people. “We are all formed of frailty and error,” and in polyamorous relationships, our mistakes affect more people. Polyamory raises the stakes.
Love has a way of coming into our lives like an unexpected tornado, ripping off the roof and sending the furniture flying. In my book More Than Two, my co-author and I talk about the monogamous fairy tale that true love conquers all—but there’s a polyamorous fairy tale, too. We like to tell the story that polyamory means that when you meet someone new, you can love that person without losing your existing relationships. Louisa and I came to polyamory from very different directions, yet we both learned, each in our own way, that the polyamorous fairy tale isn’t always true, either.
Polyamory is disruptive because love is disruptive. Even in polyamory, no matter how good your intentions, sometimes you will meet someone new, and that meeting will lead to the loss of someone you love. Love challenges us. Love changes us. If we falter, even for a moment, if we fail to treat the hearts of those we love with compassion and wisdom, we can fall.
The ways we respond to heartbreak, and the people we allow ourselves to become in the aftermath, are what really speak to the truth of our selves. We learn wisdom from the times we fall. Polyamory, for better or for worse, gives us more opportunities to fall.
Read this book. When you’re done, read it again. The wisdom in it is hard-won. Learn from Louisa’s experience. No matter who you are, no matter how you love, there is something here that can make your life better.
— Franklin Veaux, 2015
TO MY YOUNGER SELF
“Hey, who are you?”
“I’m you, in the future.”
“You’ve put on weight. And your hair is turning grey.”
“Maybe so. But you’re a lot happier in my world than you are in yours.”
It’s written plain as day on your face. A world where I can be happier with grey hair and ten more kilos? Impossible. But you can see that you’re more beautiful now than you ever were. Joy has transformative power. And back then, you were working out quite a few demons. It showed in your body, your face and your behaviour. It wasn’t always pretty. Sometimes, when you were drunk, it was downright ugly. Remember that time your husband filmed you? He captured the drunk Louisa in all her glory. Nasty, wasn’t it?
Once you wrote a memoir that detailed the highs — and lows — of a polyamorous quad relationship. Four people, two couples, living and loving together. The relationship, as many relationships do, ended badly. As you were a newcomer to polyamory, your memoir was an expression mostly of pain. A scream, as one of your current boyfriends describes it.
But I don’t think you ever intended for it to discourage those who wanted to enter a polyamorous relationship, nor was the memoir supposed to be used as propaganda by those who sail their banners against non-traditional relationships. And yet, when you published it, that is what it became: a warning signal to those embarking on the possibilities of new life and new love. Those with no guidance on how to avoid the pain you experienced — and the pain you inflicted on others (you did, you know).
But as time moves on, new perspective casts light on the experience. Personal development and analysis have allowed you to see some of the lessons learned. Emotional processing, after all, is one of the things we polyamorists do best. It’s allowed you to understand the reasons why your relationship crumbled, so that you can avoid some of the same pitfalls in the future, and it’s taught you that the hardest of lessons can result in the most amazing gifts.
This is not, above all, a critique of your partners’ behaviour: even if you might recognise their faults along with your own, their business is not your business. One of the best lessons you have learned over the past years is how important it is to take responsibility for the experience of your own life.
This book is about your lessons. I could have made it one hundred, or even more — after all, I’m still learning too. But I could also encapsulate it in one simple lesson that many people wiser than you or I have said before.
Know thyself.
(And keep trying, even if sometimes it seems impossible.)
INTRODUCTION BY MY OLDER SELF
“What did you expect?” said my mother, following the disastrous decline of my polyamorous quad. “And worse, why are you doing it again? Do you have a death wish? Haven’t you learnt anything?”
And I’ve asked these questions many times:
“What could I have said or done differently?”
“At what point did our relationship lose its way?”
“Did sexual desire just die, or was it pushed?”
They say that forewarned is forearmed. The truth about what purpose relationships might serve in your life, and why some of them last whilst others don’t, is elusive. If you could bottle it — why, you’d be a millionaire! But there’s no way of knowing whether our first polyamorous relationship might have evolved differently, or even of wishing that it had, had we done things differently.
All four of us made mistakes. I made mistakes. And I can’t change the past, nor would I want to, because all that I am and all that I have as the current me, I owe to the past me. (Thank you, past me.)
I have learnt a lot. How to communicate better. How to set up a polyamorous structure less conducive to drama and even abuse. What I could have done differently. But not without extensive research, thinking and yes, a whole lot of pain through self-development. I haven’t learnt that it’s safer to return to monogamy. On the contrary, some of the things I’ve uncovered are reasons why monogamy would be very bad for me. I’ve grown to know myself better, as a mixture of nature and nurture, as are we all. I’ve come to understand that my desire for freedom for both myself and my partners, for utter honesty, and to build my own reality accordingly, and my ability to love more than one, are all key facets of who I am.
But whether or not our relationship might have evolved differently, one thing was clear: it involved a lot of pain. One of the reasons I’ve done so much soul-searching is because now, unlike then, I have children. I would like to avoid such pain, such destruction, in the future. Any children who would have been caught in the crossfire would have had a very bad time of it. And yet putting the longevity of your relationship above all other things is also dangerous: valuing yourself is also about knowing when to leave. You must be able to demonstrate to yourself and others that relationships do end, and set an example for your children that teaches them they don’t have to stay in situations that make them unhappy — even if much of the work to be done is probably within themselves. You can leave, but if you don’t learn from your experiences, you are destined to make the same mistakes over and over again, and you will not find happiness elsewhere.
If you are in a polyamorous relationship, you will know that it is not always hearts and roses; indeed, sometimes it might seem as if you are g
oing mad. You are not — at least, no more than we all are. You are, just like Alice, sane…but in a world that seems illogical, backwards and sometimes utterly incomprehensible. Why?
1. Because society has always instructed you that there is only one way to have relationships
2. Because you are not prepared for the enormity of the work you might have to do on yourself to be able to grow into someone who can cope with a previously uncharted reality
The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand human nature and your relationships. The more you understand your relationships, the better equipped you will be to stand up to the world and its recriminations.
So rest assured, there are lessons here that will not only improve the chances for your relationship, but also help you function in your daily life with more happiness, more love and a stronger sense of self-worth.
1
My French Not-Quite-Lover
You thought you were in love. You thought love would conquer all. But only one of those two beliefs was true.
You had escaped an abusive relationship, so now you sought someone you could control — or at least, someone who would never control you. You sought someone to care for. After being the victim for so long, you wanted to be the rescuer, and here was a man who could be rescued. But this rescue was no act of altruism: you unconsciously desired power. It fed into your damaged self-esteem and helped you regain your confidence.